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5 Creepy Wildlife Facts

The world is full of some beautiful wonders... and some ugly disasters!

Look me in the eyesss!

Insects are Everywhere!

'Hey, i cAN'T help the way i look!'

According to the Smithsonian Encyclopedia, there are an estimated 10 quintillion insects alive at any one time.

10,000,000,000,000,000,000

That's a lot of zeros.

If this number is hard to comprehend, it can be scaled down to a figure of 200 million insects per human.

Imagine being sat in a room with them all!

There's a Frog... With Hair

'Which way to the salon?'

Well, they have a hair-like substance around their sides and the back of their legs. These are called 'dermal papillae' and they contain arteries, their purpose being to help the 'hairy' frog absorb more oxygen through the skin from water.

Believe to or not, this isn't the most unbelievable or creepy fact about the 'hairy frog' (name courtesy of real, actual scientists because Trichobatrachus robustus wouldn't do). Oh no, this amphibian is hiding a much more morbid secret.

It's the closest thing to an X-Man in the wild; having retractable claws made of bone, not keratin. By extending these claws, the frog intentionally breaks it's 'toe' bones and pierces through the toe skin to attack.

Sounds like a diva to me, long hair and a killer pedicure, total frog-princess.

A Sluggish Ninja

'sssssh!'

The 'Borneo Hills Ninja Slug' is aptly named. It cannot fit inside its shell, it curls up like a cat when sleeping but it doesn't need a hidden place to be a ninja in its own right.

What makes it so like a secret assassin is it's ability to shoot 'love-darts' at potential mates.

These calcium carbonate potent projectiles are tipped with the appropriate hormones to induce a mating frenzy between the two of them. So, yeah...

The Weirdest Tongue in the South

shhlllliiirrrp

You probably know a good few things about the colour-changing reptile already, but it's tongue is the real star.

This particular appendage can reach over twice the chameleons body length and can be fired at a rate of 20 feet per second. Meaning it's prey can (and probably will) be caught in milliseconds.

Another interesting tongue fact is that a chameleon doesn't use a sticky tongue to catch prey, it simply forms a suction cup at the end and pulls them in.

The Many Ways Bees Live and Die

My lifestyle is the bee's knees!

The humble bumblebee is not the first thing we tend to think of when pondering the creepiest phenomenon around us, but the truth is, they're constantly committing suicide, genocide and making sweet, sweet honey.

Let's start with suicide; honey bees often work themselves to death but that's not all, when drones mate with a queen, their penis is ripped from their body in a violent g-force death before they fall to the ground, dead.

Moving swiftly on to genocide, new queens will compete to be the one hive queen. By "compete," I mean they go around violently murdering other queens, even some that haven't hatched or emerged yet. Not exactly a fair fight.

Making honey is last, and it's not as sweet as you may think. To put it simply; honey is bee vomit...

When a bee receives a deposit of nectar (which involves regurgitating it from bee to bee), it uses enzymes to turn that nectar into heavenly honey before regurgitating it again into a cell.